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Contributors
Marce Edwards is the business editor. She has been at The News Tribune for seven years and has written about technology and big businesses in the South Sound including Weyerhaeuser and Russell. Before moving to Tacoma, she worked at The Idaho Statesman in Boise. She is a Northwest native who likes to garden and refuses to use an umbrella. She lives in Tacoma with her husband and two kids.
C.R. Roberts is a Tacoma native. Before joining The News Tribune, he worked as a freelance writer and part-time cowhand on a cattle ranch in Northern Idaho. He writes about small business, personal finance and other business issues.
John Gillie writes about the aerospace and airline industries, commercial development and consumer issues. During his 30-year-tenure at The News Tribune he has covered issues as diverse as the Native American fishing rights disputes, crime and the courts, the wood products industry and energy. He lived in Tacoma with his family for 25 years, but now lives in Kent because his wife heads a five-state non-profit foundation headquartered in Ballard, and it only seemed a sensible compromise to make considering their workplaces are 40 miles apart.
Kelly Kearsley has been a business reporter at The News Tribune since 2005. She covers the Port of Tacoma and international trade. Being born and raised in Spokane she’s used to living in cities with inferiority complexes and, in fact, prefers it. Prior to working at The News Tribune, she spent three years as a reporter for The Bulletin in Bend, Oregon and another year working stints for The Associated Press and Seattle Times. She graduated from Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Tacoma with her husband and miniature schnauzer.
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Seems like ancient history now, but Washington’s taxable retail sales numbers for the second quarter of 2008 have been released by the State Department of Revenue.
Not surprisingly, they were down.
Taxable sales fell to $29.1 billion during the quarter, a 2.4 percent decline over the same quarter last year.
Retail trade, a subset of of retail sales that more accurately reflects consumer spending, was down 3.5 percent to $12.4 billion.
The biggest declines among retailers were in big-ticket items. Sales of recreational vehicles, boats and motorcycles dropped 21.7 percent. New and used car sales were down 13.2 percent.
Among the state’s five most populous counties, Pierce ranked worst in taxable sales with a 5.5 percent drop.
Retail sales in Tacoma fell 7.2 percent as compared to 3.3 percent in Seattle and 5.5 percent in Bellevue.
Sales in Spokane were pretty much flat, and in Vancouver they went up 1 percent.
Boeing is looking at the possibility of slowing its airliner production schedule if world economic conditions cut back the demand or the financing available for new aircraft, a Boeing vice president said in Paris.
Randy Tinseth, Boeing sales vice president speaking to reporters in France today, said the company could throttle back its production lines if the economy erased the need for some new jetliners.
Two of the biggest aircraft leasing companies have called on Airbus and Boeing to both reduce their production in light of the world financial crisis.
Boeing had projected it would build about 480 jetliners this year at its Puget Sound factories, but a strike by the Machinists Union has shut down production since Sept. 6.
The company had expected to produce about 510 jets next year.
Airbus likewise has said it will increase the production pace on its assembly lines in 2009.
So far, cancellations and delivery postponements at both manufacturers have been minimal. Together the two manufacturers have a backlog of about 7,500 planes.
The two are scheduled to produce between 900 and 1,000 planes in total this year.
The Port of Seattle will launch its United Way Giving Campaign Wednesday with a one-time event on Sea-
Tac Airport's new third runway.
Port employees will be be able to run or walk on the 8,500-foot-long, 150-foot-wide strip of concrete at midday on either a 5-kilometer or 10-kilometer route.
They won't be dodging airliners. The new runway isn't scheduled to open until Nov. 20.
Five kilometers is two lengths of the runway. Ten K is four.
The runway cost the Port of Seattle, the airport's owner, about $1.1 billion. It will help the airport handle more traffic when the weather makes using the two existing runways at the same time impossible because they're too close to each other.
Airport authorities are hoping, of course, that no confused pilots mistake the new runway for the two open strips. Three times while the runway was being built airliners either landed on or made approaches to a taxiway adjacent to the new runway.
A large X painted on each end of the new runway designates it as inactive.
Amazon Inc.'s shares were hit on Tuesday by a sense that consumers are reigning in their spending.
Shares fell the most on the Nasdaq-100 Index after RBC Capital Markets cut its share-price and earnings estimates on “deteriorating consumer sentiment,” Bloomberg News reported.
“The change in consumer behavior does not seem targeted at one segment/vehicle, but is rather a broad-based decreased willingness to spend,” RBC analysts led by Stephen Ju wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday.
The New York-based analysts cut Amazon’s share-price estimate by 20 percent to $80 and lowered their sales forecasts by 5 percent to $19 billion for 2008 and 12 percent to $21.8 billion for 2009.
Amazon fell 9.9 percent to $55.86. The shares have lost 35 percent so far this year, compared with a 40 percent drop in the index.
Todd Bucholz, the keynote speaker at the annual Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber breakfast talked to the crowd about how to survive a tough economy, this morning,Oct. 14.
Dean J. Koepfler /The News Tribune
